Account of a Tour in Normandy, Volume 1 eBook

Returning from this short botanical digression, let
me tell you that the position considered by some as
the southern side of the fortification, but which
I have described as the sinuous part of the western,
has its ramparts of less height. Not so the eastern:
on this, as being the most destitute of all natural
defence, (for here there is no hill, and the eye ranges
over an immense level tract, stopped only by distant
woods,) is raised an agger, full forty-five feet in
height, and, at a further distance, is added an outward
trench nearly fifty feet wide, though in its present
state not more than three feet deep, and now serving
for a garden.

Such is the external appearance of this camp, which,
seen from the sea, or on the approach either by the
west or south, cannot fail to strike from the boldness
of its position; but the effect of the interior is
still more striking; for here, while on one side the
horizon is lost in the immensity of the ocean, on
the other two the view is narrowly circumscribed by
the lofty bulwark, at whose feet are almost every where
discernible the remains of the trenches I have already
noticed, more than thirty feet in width. Nor
is this the only remarkable circumstance; for it is
still more unaccountable to observe, extending nearly
across the encampment, the traces of an ancient fosse
not less than one hundred and fifty feet wide, and,
though in most places shallow, terminating towards
the sea in a deep ravine. Internally the camp
appears to have been also divided into three parts,
in one of which it has been supposed, from a heap
of stones which till lately remained, that there was
originally a place of greater strength; while in another,
distinguished by some irregular elevations, it is conjectured
that there was a wall, the defence probably to the
keep.

[Illustration: Plan of Caesar’s Camp, near
Dieppe]

But I must tell you that these conjectures are none
of my own, nor could I have had any opportunity of
making them; the stones and the hillocks having disappeared
before the operations of the plough. Such as they
are, I have borrowed them from a dissertation by the
Abbe de Fontenu[15], a copy of whose engraving of
the place I insert. Indebted as I am to him for
his hints, I can, however, by no means subscribe to
his reasoning, by which he labors with great erudition
to prove that, neither the popular tradition which
ascribes this camp to Caesar, nor its name, evidently
Roman, nor some coins and medals of the same nation
that have been found here, are at all evidences of
its Latin origin; but that, as we have no proof that
Caesar was ever in the vicinity of Dieppe, as the
whole is in such excellent preservation, (a point I
beg leave to deny,) and as the vallum is full thrice
the height of that of other Roman encampments in France[16],
we are bound to infer it is a work of far more modern
times, and probably was erected by Talbot, the Caesar
of the English[17], while besieging Dieppe in the middle
of the XVth century.